It's probably because I grew up there but I found the repeated "Lawng Islund"s very annoying and wish some editor had taken them out. But I suppose if my grandmother was a notorious poisoner I might have a really annoying verbal tic too. Was her name Livia? Otherwise, it was a really creepy story and a good read.

Yeah, I didn't really get the Lawng Islund thing. I mean, I know how people with a heavy Long Island accent would say Long Island, but if I weren't cued, I'd never have guessed that "Lawng Islund" was supposed to represent it.

He made me anxious. He never molested or beat any of us, it was just a feeling that something was building, seething beneath the surface. I had once tried to articulate it to a school counsellor but it didn't come out right. I mean, a lot of kids think their dad is weird.

Hey kiddo, did you try mentioning the "gleefully kills small animals in front his children"?

Or, rather, the wrong sort of small animals. Because taking your children out into the woods and shooting a deer dead in front of them, or a bird, or clubbing a fish to death - that would be perfectly OK.

The serial killer one doesn't really seem as creepy as the poisoning grandmother. Not that the dad one is normal but it seems textbook, like once she describes him you're well into the zone of "yep, that's totally a dude who would kill a bunch of hookers".

But the grandmother chronically poisoning a bunch of family members? That shit is bananas.

But I could see how, as a high school kid, you couldn't articulate convincingly what was weird with your dad, to an uncooperative adult.

(I used to have a similar problem with my extremely violent cat at the vet. I'd try to warn them, and they'd basically say "there, there, everybody thinks their cat is crazy". Then my cat would scratch up their face and they'd be bleeding and say "we're not looking at your crazy cat." And I'd be like "but he still has diarrhea! Why did you let him have easy access to your face like that? I warned you.")

I think it was the fiance bit that got me. They were willing to let someone else come into the grandmother's house, be potentially victimized, and not even warn her? I would have burned rubber getting out of that relationship.

16: It's interesting to wonder how that would work in real life. This is obviously what you'd do if you were in a movie and needed a scientist to explain what was happening around the 40-minute mark... but in real life, is there just a lab you can go to, fork over a few bucks and have them test your bubby's food for poison?

The day of the accident, he was scheduled to go out on a rented boat, but Grandma didn't want him to go--she always complained about the rentedness of rented boats how expensive it was--so she slipped him something.

29: I admit that it seems very clear to me. I also admit that I have strong biases that I don't work very hard to overcome.

It's just endlessly boggling to me that some people are not only *tempted* to believe wildly implausible things, but actually do believe them. Do they not have friends? Do their friends not have critical thinking skills? Do their friends try to convince them, and are just ignored?*

*I have had the experience of telling someone (repeatedly) that a nutritionist acquaintance of his sets off HUGE creep alarms and my sisters and I all think he's a pedophile. Has he listened? Nope. Thinks we're "overreacting" and "hyper-critical". Dude. He's a NUTRITIONIST. There are plenty of others out there. Stop associating with him.

But you are getting the whole story IN RETROSPECT, after the guy put the pieces together. Of course it sounds extremely clear to you from here.

Also are not (a) and (b) in a certain amount of conflict? Where (a) is I also admit that I have strong biases that I don't work very hard to overcome. and (b) is It's just endlessly boggling to me that some people are not only *tempted* to believe wildly implausible things, but actually do believe them.

I'm tending towards team Witt, because of the totality of the circumstances. For god's sakes, multiple family members all have the same symptoms, all stop eating the food and witness the disappearance of the symptoms, etc. to the point that it's common knowledge in the family that grandma is poisoning everyone. And holy the shit the girlfriend story, along with this.

But it wasn't until my 30s that I connected all this and it dawned on me that sleeping for three days is not normal or OK, and that the only times I woke up in the middle of the night unable to breathe, I was at Grandma's.

It's just endlessly boggling to me that some people are not only *tempted* to believe wildly implausible things, but actually do believe them.

How is "Grandma is poisoning everyone" not a wildly implausible thing to believe? How often does grandma poison everyone, outside of the realms of folklore and legend? It seems normal to cling to the possibility that your situation is actually not bizarre and inexplicable.

Yes, it's definitely true that things are obvious in retrospect, so it's easy for us (me) to have confirmation bias when being told a story after the fact. The things that tripped me up were the same ones gswift mentions, though. Even at the time those would have seem so ludicrous I can't imagine I wouldn't have acted.

I'm trying to think whether there is a conflict between A and B. What I was thinking when I wrote the "strong biases" was that I have one (for example) in favor of accuracy and against personal relationships. That is, I'm more interested in the factually correct version of something than the version that makes someone look better, even if I like the person.

I have probably an argument a week with [a person in authority] about this. He consistently wants to believe the best of people because he likes them personally, and I'm forever the killjoy going, 'I don't care if he seems nice, he's behaving illegally.'

Another bias is that I tend to think that if something seems weird, it's worth checking out. And that you shouldn't avoid checking something out because it seems silly or farfetched. If it's harmless, it's harmless -- and if it's not, you know.

35: You don't have to get all the way to "Grandma is deliberately poisoning people" to deal with this, though. You can talk about what's happening and openly speculate about it. You can directly ask if there was some way the food got spoiled.

The article reads as though the family just kept coming up with more and more byzantine ways to avoid acknowledging what was happening.

The poisoner grandma was very weird. Maybe it's just because it's so fucked up and the writing style is so very flakey but I just have this overriding feeling there's weird floating disassociations from reality all round that family including the narrator.

At first, my mother was the only one who'd refuse to eat Grandma's food, and I thought she was being paranoid. Then I started noticing that every time I went to Grandma's, I'd pass out on the couch or on the train on the way back to the city. When I stopped eating Grandma's food, my brother thought I was paranoid. But I stopped passing out, and pretty soon he stopped eating Grandma's food too.

WTF? INVESTIGATE IT. You are the POLICE.

I'm thinking that at the least there might be some key details missing from that framing.

Special Containment Procedures: Subject is to be contained in a nursing home located in special site [REDACTED] at normal room temperature with no possible access to kitchen facilities or household cleaning supplies. Food prepared for subject must be completely consumed by subject under supervision or destroyed. Conversation with subject must be minimal. Under no circumstances are personnel to accept foodstuffs or "goodies" from subject. Personnel from team Aleph once entered subjects habitation to change a light bulb over subjects protestations and accepted a handful of junior mints and what appeared to be a potato latke - after failure to report and a search of the entire facility, entire team was later found in a utility closet 3 days later with no memory of the event.

Description: Subject appears in the guise of an sweet harmless old Jewish grandmother. Induces vague sense of anxiety and feelings of personal failure to live up to expectations.

There was a piece recently by a woman whose father had been murdered when she was very young (I believe shot by a best friend whose wife or ex-wife he'd been sleeping with or something) and how grateful she was that it didn't happen in the internet era, where all the details would be laid out in front of her and she wouldn't have gotten to process it gradually the way she did, but also that it's sort of weird that because there's nothing online it's almost as if her dad's murder doesn't exist.

TtaM, was everyone getting asked for body hair? Did they want a DNA sample or were they checking against what they knew? That seems awfully specific, though admittedly I haven't read the link yet because I wasn't initially planning to write this comment.

They didn't ask for a sample. They had a standard form they were filling in with descriptions of everyone they interviewed. So they had to ask about body hair, etc.

It was before they found her body, so they had no forensics. So, my understanding was, that they were taking that kind of information so they could do a filter on the hundreds of people they'd spoken to, if and when they got forensic or CCTV evidence. I presume if they found dark body hair, or had CCTV of someone with a prominent tattoo, or whatever, they could then run the database of forms they'd collected to filter down to just the X people they needed to speak to.

When I was at the doctor with Pokey yesterday, they had me filling out a form about whether or not he'd been to Liberia and Sierra Leone, whether he'd been running a fever and bleeding, and so on. It was a whole page, although not a dense page, of questions. The thing that I found odd is that we were not at an ER or a walk-in clinic - it was an orthopedist.

67. These days is every even-remotely medical venue wants a complete medical history. I had to fill one out the other day at the dentist, because they switched from paper to digital. It was five different forms via a terrible iPad app. As much detail as they'd want if it was a surgeon contemplating doing a heart transplant. No Ebola form though, even though that would be relevant to a dentist.

67+70: As I was saying a few weeks ago, if it doesn't look faintly ridiculous to outsiders, you're not doing it right.

70: The complete medical history for the dentist is completely justifiable. We make an artificial cultural distinction between tooth doctors and specialists in other body parts. What's bogus is the questionnaire you get from the dentist that asks questions like "Are you happy with your smile?" This is pure consumer marketing data for profitable cosmetic procedures, with no medical justification.

72: I was going to say the same thing. It's a mess, the current situation. Theoretically the right answer is a portable digital personal health record that the individual controls and grants access to. Alas, no actor in the system has any incentive to make this a reality. The fact that google tried and failed to shake them up makes me doubt that PHR will ever replace EMR, though I know plenty of people who disagree.

71. Why is it justifiable? "Because dentists are doctors, too!" is not a sufficient reason.

My dentist doesn't do the "Happy with your smile?" thing. Aside from the incessant form-filling, which is a characteristic of all medical types, he's great.

73. I said to the hygienist (who actually was the one who gave me the iPad), "I wish I had a little USB thing I could plug in to give you this stuff." She wished it too; it's no particular fun for them either.

And it is in essence a panopticon, as the data they collect eventually goes into some cloud-based backup system which experience tells us is not all that well protected. So, if someone creepy wants your medical records, they are much more accessible than in the paper-filled past.

78.1: I don't know exactly what questions your dentist was asking, but certainly there are many conditions they need to know about in order to not do anything dangerous to you. Also, oral health (of your gums) and cardiovascular disease are closely related.

Didn't I post some article about how artificial and destructive it was that there's this historical legacy separating out dentistry from the rest of medicine? You get those horror stories about how an uninsured kid dies from a tooth infection, and the photos of the free dental clinics that show up for a twelve hour Saturday in a high school gym, and crank through as many uninsured people as they possibly can.

Also there's a bunch of pregnancy-related concerns, which I forget the details of.

81. The usual yes/no checklist of every medical condition known to medicine, every medication you take, whether you smoke or ever did, and so on. I suspect it's not specific to dentists, but rather generic to medical practices of all sorts.

There were no dentistry-specific questions. The actual dental records are in a different system. If I were a tad more cynical, I'd believe that the form (and the other four forms that went with it) are more there as CYA. "He didn't tell us he was allergic to dental floss!" (The other forms are more like software license agreements: too long to read and no doubt acknowledging you were told about X, and agree to allow Y, and will refrain from suing them for Z.)

Smoking is very strongly related to many things a dentist treats. Yes, the dentist is asking these questions to cover their asses and because the form is standard. But I don't see anything specific to dentists about that. If I go see the GP for poison ivy, they still ask the standard battery despite it not having much to do with treating poison ivy.

82 et al. Sure, sure, but most of the things on the checklist aren't relevant to those issues. I doubt it would have impacted the kid with the tooth infection (I remember that story -- didn't it happen in the DC suburbs?). Certainly asking if you have a heart condition, or are taking blood thinning drugs, or are pregnant; those are worthwhile.

Anyway, I'll shut up now. I'm a hypocrite on this anyway. As I said earlier, make it easy for me (a card or a USB stick) and I'll let them have everything. (Are you listening, NSA?)

88. I'm not pregnant, but I try to make them stretch out the time between x-rays as much as possible.

87: It still sort of bugged me when I went to see an ENT for a bloody nose that he made me fill out an entire sheet with questions about my sleep.

I did it, but then I wrote: "I have already been diagnosed with sleep hypopnea." On the way out the door after he had cauterized my nose, he gave me panphlets about surgical treatment for sleep apnea. Those aren't that helpful in most cases, and I'd rather not be that aggressive.

I went to a new doctor yesterday (to have sutures removed from where I cut my finger on some glass last week) and instead of filling out an elaborate form, I just had a casual chat with him about my medical history. Exotic!

crank through as many uninsured Medicaid eligible people as they possibly can.

FTFY. This is an example of a service that is potentially immensely value, but gets corrupted by the profit motive. Even with the corruption, it probably does more good than harm overall, but the abusive aspects of it are a bitter pill to swallow to get dental care for poor children.

93: mass dental association fought allowing hygienists to go into schools to put sealant on kids' teeth. Dentists are even more successful than the AMA at excluding other professionals for guild reasons.

94: This article has good reporting on the topic. Dental care was a hot area for private equity investment for a while. The investment thesis is hard to argue with: fragmented business that can be rolled up to gain scale advantages; lots of potential for de-skilling the production process; mostly self-pay with lots of potential for upselling additional services; substantial uncollected receivables that can generate additional cash flow through more aggressive collections practices (which small practices have traditionally shied away from); potential for higher equity returns by taking on more debt in the capital structure than would be prudent for individually owned practices, etc.

99: There was a Frontline episode about that. One state had been successful at doing similar stuff in a non profit setting. CT had a lot of Medicaid kids getting crappy quality crowns instead of fillings. Florida has a ton of kids who get dental surgery in hospitals under general anesthesia, because it's not covered until they get to that point. And Aspen Dental sells fancy dentures to vulnerable old people while pushing their credit cards.